


Janna Vs. The Forces Of Darkness - Chapter 1: Dead Powers Rising

by Sirkylelenn, TheInvaderZim



Category: Star vs. The Forces Of Evil
Genre: Action/Adventure, Adventure, Alternate Universe, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 14:03:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20547362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sirkylelenn/pseuds/Sirkylelenn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheInvaderZim/pseuds/TheInvaderZim
Summary: After destroying the school library and spending hours helping the Janitor clean, Janna's back to square one in her search for magic.Little does she know, she's about to find a book that will change her life forever...





	Janna Vs. The Forces Of Darkness - Chapter 1: Dead Powers Rising

It was Saturday afternoon and Janna, to her greatest displeasure, was still at school.

She’d been on-campus without other students around before, of course, so the empty corridors weren’t a new sight for her. But when she would’ve normally been sabotaging classrooms or ‘improving’ the mascot statue out front, she was instead under the watchful eye of the school janitor as they scrubbed down the halls, scoured bathrooms, cleaned desks, and generally did dozens of other things that Janna would’ve normally rather caused than repaired.

She was still wearing her charm around her neck - an ever-present reminder of why she was stuck doing labor to begin with. Since her one successful activation the previous Wednesday, she’d tried using it on Skullnick, her sister, Marco, and even her best friend Jackie Lynn Thomas, all to no avail. Whatever it had done (if it had actually done _anything_) had, apparently, been a one time thing.

Still, it never hurt to keep trying…

She’d been left to clean a girls’ bathroom, while her overseer cleaned the boys’. Despite her failures, mulling over the necklace so thoroughly proved to be a blessing in disguise - thinking so intently about magic helped her avoid thinking about what she was _actually_ doing.

The Janitor entered with his mop and bucket as Janna finished her own room (having learned quickly that it was better to do the job fast). Her head was buzzing and she could hardly smell anything but bleach, which was completely for the better.

The janitor nodded in approval, but didn’t smile. He never smiled. “Next,” he only said.

Janna sighed deeply. It was now or never! ...Again.

She held her necklace up and looked the older man dead in the eyes. The Janitor (she hadn’t bothered asking for his name, and he had never shared) was a tall, skinny man in his mid-30s who sported the peculiarity of being blond and simultaneously looking both Italian and Mexican. His hair was close to his scalp and thinning as though it’d wanted to go partially bald but gave up halfway, and his face had a blank, well-worn look that matched his janitor uniform. Overall he looked a bit like if someone had cross-bred a cherub with a latino and then fed the result nothing but pasta from the moment they were born.

Janna focused on his mustache, since his blank eyes made her uncomfortable. “Actually, I want you to let me go early,” she ordered, and the Janitor didn’t so much as blink.

“I’m sure,” he said in a monotone. “Come on, we’ve got the entire cafeteria to do next.”

“I need you to let me leave.” Janna raised her voice slightly. The effect was noticeable in the otherwise-quiet bathroom.

The Janitor sighed and dropped his bucket, then turned back around. “Listen kid,” he said. “You don’t want to be here. I don’t want to be watching you. But you’ve caused as many of my headaches as the rest of the school combined. Deal with it.”

Then he picked the bucket back up and left, and Janna gathered her supplies before following. It was all she could do to keep her teeth from grinding in frustration as she did.

The worst part of the experiment, she’d decided, was that she couldn’t be _totally_ sure the charm had actually worked to begin with. Marco had definitely acted like something happened, which was why he’d chased her so determinedly - but she hadn’t felt the effects herself… and as time went on and her failures mounted, the sparkling charm in her memory started to seem less and less obvious.

So if it was magic, it wasn’t working. But did real magic just run out? The necklace had sat in a dusty crypt for hundreds of years - would its batteries go dead like that? Maybe it wasn’t really magic… but if it wasn’t, _why had Marco acted the way he had?_

Only worsening this problem was that Marco himself was doing everything he could to avoid talking about ‘that.’ Any time Janna brought it up to him (which was basically every opportunity she could), he either changed the subject or else quickly walked away.

This was, in itself, not a new phenomenon - topics garnering similar reactions included Marco’s overly obvious crush on Janna’s best friend, and a few of the more embarrassing favors he’d asked of Janna over the years. Topping the list was, of course, the myriad of pressure points surrounding his ‘safe-kid’ reputation, the most famously well-known being when he’d decided a bicycle helmet had been an appropriate just-in-case for an after-P.E. shower.

Still, having it applied to information she so desperately needed to confirm was _maddening_.

At this impasse, she joined the Janitor in the cafeteria as they began stacking tables, picking up stray trash, and mopping floors. She reached for her phone to check the time, and found it flashing a low-battery icon.

At this, she set her jaw. She decided that the necklace must be going through something similar - it had a dead magic battery… somehow. A charging session was in order.

_If I can’t charge it tomorrow,_ she decided, _I’ll give it up. I mean, if it actually was magic, there’ll be other magic stuff out there for me to find, right?_

* * *

24 hours later, despite her plans, Janna couldn’t resist sleeping in. It was nearly noon before she left her bed, hands and feet aching from all the scrubbing she’d been doing. She stretched languidly, blissfully relishing her only day off.

The homework still sitting in her bag in the corner never crossed her mind. Instead, she immediately grabbed the necklace on her nightstand. Day off or not, she had _real_ work to do.

Though most teachers (and more than a few students) would call Janna an idiot for her grades (if not also for her obsession with magic) she was quite a study when she actually cared about what she was studying. In this case, she’d spent the previous evening making a list of every form of energy she could think of, both scientific and otherwise. A couple were out of her reach, but she still had quite a pile to go through before the day was done. So, dressing and setting out into the house, she passed her younger sister on the couch and headed straight for the kitchen.

The Russo household was a mix of being messy, decaying, and just odd. The clutter was superficial but everywhere, and made up mostly of belongings and trash from a household of 3 girls who couldn’t be bothered to pick up after themselves.

The decay was inherent, as the house itself was falling apart. The patchy wallpaper was peeling away one unpatched hole at a time, unpainted stucco appearing beneath it. The house leaned to the right from both the outside and in, and the aging carpets and furniture were fraying and stained from the aforementioned mess. Whether or not the hot water worked often depended on the weather.

And of course, there were the oddities. Janna’s mom had once been an avid collector of magic junk just as Janna was, and much of it was sitting on shelves collecting dust. Everything from dream charms to voodoo dolls to animal skulls to potion ingredients lined dusty, broken-down shelves and filled the closets.

The kitchen was no exception to any of this - dirty dishes filled the sink and the counters needed a good scrub. The trash can was overflowing in the corner, and the sink dripped continually no matter what was done to it. A Buddha statue sat serenely on the dust-covered sill above the sink, far too enlightened to notice the mess.

Janna extracted a pot from the tower of dishes in the sink, giving it a quick rinse and filling it with water before setting it on the stove. A lighter was retrieved from a nearby drawer, and used as a pilot when she couldn’t get the gas to ignite like normal.

When the pot reached a rolling boil, she dropped the necklace in and watched as it fell to the bottom of the water. The tip of the chain she kept wrapped around her finger for a moment before it began to heat up, the laws of thermodynamics proving to be intact.

After a few minutes, she removed the necklace with a fork (also from the sink), and allowed it to cool on the counter while putting the pot back to its semi-permanent place between a stack of cheese-encrusted bowls and virtually every piece of tupperware the family owned.

She put the charm back on as her sister Joleen reentered the kitchen, the chain feeling warm (but not unpleasantly so) around her neck. Her sister opened the fridge and extracted a pudding cup, turning without a second thought back towards the living room before Janna stopped her.

“Joleen, I want you to give me that pudding cup,” she ordered.

Joleen looked down at the pudding, then back at Janna, then back down at the pudding. Opening it, she took a long lick directly off the top, turned, and headed back into the living room.

Janna sighed. Heat, it seemed, was not the magic energy that the necklace required.

Next up, though, was something far more exciting: unadulterated radiation.

Technically, she’d found out that anything exposed to natural light was being exposed to radiation. So if she wanted a less concentrated dose, she could’ve just left the necklace in the backyard for a few minutes.

But she’d been wearing it over her clothes for days, and so, that wasn’t good enough. Without hesitation she stepped over to the microwave, set down a paper towel on the mess which lined its bottom, dropped the charm in (chain and all), and hit start.

Almost immediately, there was a popping as the metal chain began to spark and flash. The microwave groaned, but Janna was undeterred. She only took a step back, still watching intently through the grimy window.

As the timer continued, the sparks got more and more intense, but she couldn’t tell if anything was changing about the necklace itself. Finally, with a crack, the microwave itself died.

Janna opened it after a moment, thought better of putting her hand on the metal chain she’d just microwaved, and reached back in with a paper towel. The necklace seemed unchanged, once again, but she put it on anyway.

Joleen reentered the kitchen as she did and paid absolutely no attention to any of this. Instead she withdrew a container of mac and cheese from the fridge, flipped the top off into the sink to join its compatriots and dumped half the contents into a still-clean bowl.

Janna concentrated, muttering the incantation under her breath just in case _that_ was why the pendant hadn’t worked after her attempted first recharging. Then, she faced her sister.

“Joleen, make me a bowl too.”

Joleen Russo was like her sister in many ways, including appearance and fashion sense, with the younger being nearly a duplicate of the older. The key differences: Janna wore her hair straight, while Joleen had a short braid. Janna’s beanie was olive-green, Joleen’s was russet-brown. Janna preferred blues and greens, while Joleen trended towards earthy reds and browns. And of course, Joleen was shorter, being an 11-year-old.

They were both troublemakers, neither cared much for school, and they both enjoyed a good bowl of mac and cheese, preferably a few times a week. And like her sister, there was nothing Joleen hated more than being bossed around by her sibling.

So, staring defiantly at her older sister, Joleen scraped the remainder of the tupperware’s contents into the now-overflowing bowl, tossed the container into the sink, and went for the microwave.

Janna only shook her head and muttered obscenities under her breath - not only was her necklace not working, but now she’d _also_ need to find something else to have for dinner.

She was out of the kitchen before Joleen started shouting, the microwave refusing to turn on.

* * *

It was well into the evening before Janna finally mustered the courage for a third charging attempt, this time using an AC current, otherwise known as electricity.

She’d run dozens of possibilities through her head, but the necklace didn’t exactly have a port for a phone charger or a slot for AA batteries. Jumper cables were out as well - there were only a few hard rules in the Russo household (most of them having to do with not burning the house down and not making Mom angry) and “don’t mess with mom’s car” was a rule that fell undoubtedly beneath the latter.

So, holding a pair of rubber cleaning gloves, Janna was standing in front of a spare electrical socket in her room and debating on whether her current idea was bad enough to abort it entirely.

But the march of progress wouldn’t be so easily abated. Shrugging her shoulders, putting on the rubber gloves and removing the necklace once again, she looked past the potential consequences… and squarely at the tiny face she was about to stick a big piece of metal into.

At just the right angle, the tip of the charm was able to get into one of the slots… barely. (Un)fortunately, though, she quickly found that glass didn’t conduct the current. Janna stepped back, expecting some kind of reaction, but all she saw was a glass ornament stupidly wedged into a power socket.

She retrieved it and saw no change - it hadn’t even gotten warm. But she wasn’t done, either - if the ornament were made to be a part of a _circuit_….

Using the ornament’s narrowest piece as a prod, she slowly fed the metal chain into the socket. Almost immediately, there was a result.

Sparks flashed and sputtered and she jumped back, thankful that she’d been wearing gloves. The lightshow got more intense and the socket popped and crackled, but the chain was wedged in too tight to be freed. Apprehensively, she watched as the lights in her room flickered, before, with a great hum and a crack, they turned off entirely.

The sparks around the outlet stopped, and she hurried over to make sure the carpet wouldn’t catch fire before withdrawing the necklace.

The chain was hot, now, but the necklace itself still looked unchanged. She could hear Joleen shouting in anger from the front of the house as the TV refused to turn back on.

She debated going out into the front room as her necklace cooled again, hoping vainly that she’d managed the impossible. But then the front door slammed, and she heard her mom ask “what’s wrong with the garage door?” Such an idea was quickly stopped.

She listened intently for her name as Joleen complained to her mom, but didn’t hear it once, and couldn’t help but sigh in relief. What had transpired between her and her bedroom’s wall socket would be a secret she’d take to her grave.

Hearing her mom grumble something, she was jolted out of her relief by a tired-sounding “Janna!” called from the living room. She put her necklace back on, hid the rubber gloves, and did her best to act nonchalant as she left the safety of her den.

Her mom looked as tired as usual, her frazzled hair and typical stained work uniform accompanied by a small bag of groceries. Still, she offered her older daughter a small smile. “Could you help me fix the power?”

Janna’s heart slid from it’s place in its throat back down to between her ribs, and it was all she could do to just smile in return. “Sure.” Her mom led them into the garage.

“Go get the cleaning gloves, please.”

If Janna returned more expediently than she’d expected from that request, Mom Russo chose not to voice it.

Together, the two flipped open the rusty electrical panel in the garage, and Janna’s mom rummaged through a cardboard box stored behind it that looked about as old as Joleen.

“Probably just a blown fuse.” Floricia explained. “You should learn how to fix these.”

Withdrawing a good fuse from the bottom of the box, she eyed it with thinly-veiled relief at its presence. Then she indicated which fuse was broken, how to tell, and emphasized turning off the power before replacing it. Finally, she watched carefully as Janna replaced the blown coil and flipped the power back on.

“Good job,” she smiled at the girl. “Go see if everything turned back on.”

In short order, Janna found that the damage might’ve been a bit more severe than a blown fuse. None of the kitchen appliances had turned back on, nor had any of the lights. The television worked (much to Joleen’s delight), but nothing else in the house would follow suit.

Relaying this news to her mother, Ms. Russo only sighed, her eyes dropping. But she didn’t hesitate. Instead she immediately began rummaging through the garage’s many boxes before finally withdrawing armfuls of extension cords and power strips. She gave half to Janna.

“Looks like we’re using these.” Her tone was filled with false positivity, as if she was saying ‘it could be worse’ but not believing it herself. They were brought into the house and strung together - after half an hour, orange and white cords were running in every direction along the floors and walls, ensuring that although the AC probably wouldn’t be working for the next few days, at least the lamps would turn on and they could charge their phones.

After getting the remainder set up, Janna ran one back to her room, feeling somewhat guilty but overall, too distracted by the necklace - once again - to properly process what she’d done. If anything, it only served to further motivate her: she’d come this far, she had to keep going or else it would all be for nothing!

And yet, the conventional power sources had been exhausted - that only left the mystic arts as a remainder, which, in retrospect, she realized she probably should’ve started with.

So, gingerly, she unwrapped the bundle of supplies that Marco had brought her at the end of the previous week. Inside were a few carefully wrapped vials of fluids which she’d yet to identify properly. Accompanying them were candles, a miniature leather book (blank), and an unopened letter from her dad.

All of these things she set aside, but for the candles. Next, she retrieved some chalky pastels from her desk and drew a circle atop it, rummaging through a nearby book (‘Ritualism and You: Baby’s First Invocations’) for the symbol. Placing the necklace in the center, she lit the candles and, consulting the same book, began to chant.

She didn’t understand the words themselves. They were mostly in latin, AKA ‘the magic language,’ but it certainly _felt_ mystical. Unfortunately, just as she finished the ritual there was a knock at her door.

Her mother stuck her head in when she didn’t get an answer, and Janna bit her tongue as she turned to face her.

Her mom looked at the ritual-in-progress and her eyes lit up. She moved closer and examined the necklace at the center, while Janna watched.

“Where’d you get the symbol?” Floricia asked, and Janna gestured to the open book next to the candles.

“You haven’t tried everything in there yet?” She asked, and Janna shrugged.

“If at first you don’t succeed…” she quoted, and Ms. Russo chuckled.

“I must’ve owned a dozen books just like this before you were born,” she said, and gave a sigh as she remembered. Then she looked at her daughter. “Whatever it is you’re doing wouldn’t have anything to do with the power being out, would it?”

Janna looked away and her mom sighed as her smile dropped. “Oh, Janna…”

She moved some dirty clothes off of her daughter’s bed and sat down. “Be careful with the power.” She said. “I’ll need to get an electrician but we don’t have the money right now. If we blow out the one outlet that’s working, that’s it.”

Janna nodded and did her best to look forlorn.

“How’s your community service?” Her mom asked.

Janna shrugged. “It sucks.”

Her mom smiled. “Good. That’s the point.” Then she sighed again. “Janna, you need to get yourself together. This house won’t last forever, and I can’t work like this forever. If you don’t manage to graduate, I don’t know what you’ll do. There’s more to life than magic. I learned that the hard way.”

Janna thought about this, but it made her uncomfortable, so then she stopped thinking about it. Her mom stood up, having said her piece.

“Have whatever you can find for dinner,” she added. “Microwave probably won’t start working again until we can get the electrician in.”

Janna chose not to comment on this, surprised enough that her mom was so passively accepting of her blowing out the house’s electricity.

Just as her mom reached the door, Janna came to a decision. “Hang on,” she said. She held up the necklace. “This is supposed to do something. I think it did something, once, at school. Can I try it on you?”

Her mom frowned and shrugged, but her eyes were twinkling. “Go for it.”

Janna held up the necklace, recited the incantation once again, and then said, “Mom, I want you to pick up my room for me.”

Janna’s mom only snorted. “Nope, sorry hon. That’s something you’ll have to do yourself. Try and find a way to get the incantation to rhyme. And go ahead and do your homework for once, while you’re at it.”

She turned and left as Janna’s face fell behind her. Slowly, she extinguished the candles, and surprising even herself, reached for her bag.

Unfortunately, though, she couldn’t make heads or tails of her homework and gave up in frustration only a few minutes later.

* * *

Lying in bed that evening, Janna slowly digested her makeshift meal of corn chips, raisins and peanuts. There were only two other ways she could think of to charge her necklace.

One was a death ritual, and as fearlessly macabre as she could be, she wasn’t quite ready to start murdering squirrels or birds on a whim.

The other was raw willpower. She’d read once that some magic required concentration from the spellcaster, their sheer force of will being used as a conduit for their soul-energy… or something.

It required undivided focus and incredible willpower, and supposedly resembled meditation.

So, rather than contemplating school the following day (and facing the cold dread that came with not doing any of her homework), she spent as long as she could focusing on the necklace as she held it in front of her. She burned its every shape and contour into her brain until the light from the moon faded out of her room. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt of a treasure hanging in front of her face, so close and yet, somehow, still out of reach.

* * *

She awoke the next morning with a mild headache, but there wasn’t any change in the necklace. After discovering (in the most unpleasant fashion) that the water heater had decided not to work that day, she was dressed. She eyed the necklace on her nightstand before she left her room. Just another trinket in a long line of junk that she’d wasted time on.

Despite it all, she still put it on. It seemed wrong, after everything, to just discard it like the rest.

By the time she arrived at school, though, she wasn’t in the best of moods. This wasn’t helped by her best friend Jackie’s own Monday-itis, or that Marco had deigned to autograph her exposed notebook when he arrived, for some reason.

The funk continued through the first half of the day where she was faced with an upcoming math test that she still wasn’t prepared for, along with a new wave of fat 0s for not doing any of her homework over the last week.

When lunch rolled around and she reported to the janitor, though, there was no amount of concentrated bad vibes that could crack his unphased demeanor. After giving her a moment to inhale an energy bar, he put her to work collecting trash in the cafeteria. She took to it with savage gusto, eager to throw something around and work out her anger.

After she’d dragged a half-dozen full trash bags to the school’s back dumpsters, she was making a game of having them burst against the container as she threw them in. The heavy ones were particularly satisfying. She went so far as to stand up on the lid for one of them, throwing it straight down over her head and watching it burst into a mess atop the pile below her.

Just as she finished the last one, the sky rumbled. Wind picked up, suddenly, and there was a crack of thunder. Janna held onto her hat, and looked up into the sky expecting to see thunderheads. Summer storms in California were rarer and rarer, but as violent as ever.

To her bizarre surprise, though, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Quite the opposite: it was as clear and blue as the hazy outskirts of Los Angeles ever got. Then there was a boom, loud and bassy enough to rattle the dumpsters next to her. The wind picked up another octave, and she flinched.

Oddity or not, she wasn’t about to get blown off her feet by it. Just as she was heading for the door inside, though, the wind stopped as quickly as it began. Janna looked up once again and her eyes widened.

Streaking to the ground from hundreds of feet up was _something_. Something _big_. She could barely control herself, her instincts taking over, as it went from being a dark speck to a dark postage stamp to the size of _her_. She ran, hardly making it a couple of steps before diving to the ground as the thing struck with an earth-shattering crash.

She lay on the ground, stunned, waiting for her ears to stop ringing and her heart to stop pounding, before she finally stood up and looked around. She was covered in dust, but other than that, to her surprise, nothing in the alley seemed to have changed. There was no crater, no dust cloud, no trace of whatever it was that had fallen down.

Then, she noticed, the dumpster that she’d been throwing her bags into had _moved_.

The lids were now both down, and it was sitting a clean 3 feet away from the wall where it had been before the storm. Janna cautiously approached it, but it seemed normal besides this - no hissing, no strange noises, no creaking or groaning or threats of an explosion.

She lifted the lid without reservation and looked inside, and gasped when she realized just what was laying on top of all the garbage.

* * *

While Janna had spent her weekend alternately cleaning the school and trying in vain to charge a possibly-magical necklace, Marco Diaz, resident safe-kid, had spent much of his reading a book.

The book (‘Winning Influence, Befriending People’) had quite possibly caused one of his mostly-faded bruises, as he’d borrowed it from the pile in the library before the weekend in an attempt to understand how to deal with the sudden, dramatic change in his life.

The truth was, he was starting to enjoy the idea of being _the_ popular kid in Echo Creek Academy, even if he wasn’t very well suited for it. He wanted to make sure that he retained that image for as long as possible - as disorienting as it was, he vastly preferred it to the alternative.

Step 1 (according to the book) was apparently to look the part. So, come Monday morning he’d slicked back his hair, rolled up the sleeves on his hoodie, and found a pair of old sunglasses to complete the image. No longer was he dressed as Marco Diaz, Safe Kid. Now he was Marco Diaz, Cool Dude.

Step 2 instructed that you had to _own_ your image. Don’t walk, strut. Don’t talk, act. Be fearless!

And finally, Step 3 was to make sure that whatever you did, you did it with confidence - the more overblown, the better! People wouldn’t just notice his new attitude and actions, they’d _respect_ them.

By the time Marco arrived at school Monday morning, he was nearly unrecognizable. A pair of aviator glasses hid his eyes, beneath his greased-back hair. His sleeves were pulled back to his shoulders, exposing what muscle he’d been able to build through his karate practice. He put a spring in his step and grinned, going so far as to even single-strap his backpack. He hi-fived anyone who called his name and shot finger-guns at giggling girls. The self-doubt and insecurities he’d harbored for years built up further and further under the surface, but were shoved to the side as he assured himself repeatedly _it’s what the book said to do, it’s what the book said to do…_

He strolled up to Janna’s locker and even scrawled his signature across one of her notebooks, peeking at her over the top of his glasses - not that she noticed - and felt like the king of the world.

“Hey, Marco! Love the new look.”

Then he froze, stock still, when he heard Jackie’s voice behind him. He slowly turned on the balls of his feet, smile fixed in place and all the thoughts he’d had that morning - how ridiculous his hair was, how uncool the sleeves of his hoodie probably looked bunched up around his arms - rushed to the surface as he beheld his crush.

She, of course, looked as gorgeous as ever, her unbrushed hair perfectly complementing her sleep-filled, makeup-less face to form a perfect personification of Monday-itis.

He stammered out a response, trying to grasp at what he’d learned from his books, but couldn’t even get a word out before the first-period bell rang. Jackie shot him a sleepy finger-gun and headed into class, Janna storming along after her, and Marco deflated a bit.

As he headed into class as well, he made pointedly sure to _not_ look at where the two girls were sitting near the back while he took his usual seat near the front. He took a breath and paced his heart, willing his mojo back. Recovering somewhat, he leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk as Skullnick stomped into the classroom after the students.

“FEET. DOWN!” She bellowed at him immediately, and Marco hurriedly resumed his normal position. Skullnick, obviously furious about whatever had happened over her weekend, scanned him further and cracked a malevolent smile. “What in the world are you wearing, Diaz?”

Marco took a deep breath. “New look, new me, Skullsies. You’re looking at Marco Diaz, Cool Kid.”

Skullnick stared at him, then broke into a booming laugh. “That’s good, Diaz! Oh, that’s rich!” As suddenly as she started, she stopped and glared at him. “Don’t ever call me that.”

Marco shrank down in his seat a little bit and Skullnick went to her desk, her star student successfully taken down a few pegs. She then spent the next 10 minutes detailing for the class how not only had she had a terrible date over the weekend, but that the date had been with a young, attractive, boat-owning 20-something - hence her bad mood.

Unfortunately, Marco had made himself a target: by the time lunch rolled around Skullnick had thoroughly rolled him over the coals, and he’d replaced the sleeves on his hoodie, returned his hair to its normal status, returned his sunglasses to his backpack, and slunk out of class humiliated in far too thorough a way to be repeated.

He sat alone at lunch, like he had been, and when he returned to class, Skullnick immediately instructed him to ‘go find Janna,’ the girl having not returned from break.

He set out, grumbling angrily and miserably to himself, and began to check Janna’s usual haunts.

In absolutely no hurry to return to Skullnick’s ire, he took his time in the search. By the time he’d arrived at the back of the school it was nearly halfway through the class. To no one’s surprise, he found Janna almost immediately, though he was quite a bit more surprised in the circumstances surrounding her.

Skirt-clad rear-end in the air, she was bent face-down in a dumpster behind school and tossing trash everywhere. Residue on her ankles indicated that she’d tried standing in it first, and Marco shuddered to look at her. Gingerly, he held his nose and tapped one of her ankles. He heard a “wah!” of surprise and she forced herself out into the alley a moment later.

By some miracle, she’d avoided getting anything in her hair or on her face, but he suspected her jacket and shirt would need a triple-wash before (if) they ever returned to their normal state.

Despite the fact that she’d just been rooting through a dumpster, she was beaming. Marco took a step back purely on reflex, at this - anything that made Janna that happy, in his experience, was probably worth _at least_ a detention.

“Marco!” She said excitedly. “Just who I need. Check this out.” She gestured to the garbage can and Marco only looked at her. That the dumpster stank like someone had been tossing unbagged trash into it was beside the point: considering that _Janna_ found its contents exciting, he was half-sure he was about to be shown a human corpse.

“Well I came to get you for Skullnick’s class,” he said while still holding his nose, “but maybe it’d _actually_ be better if you just went home and took a shower.”

“What?” Janna asked, and looked down at herself. There was a piece of rotting tomato on her soiled jacket, which she quickly plucked off. “Oh. No, seriously dude, _look_.”

Taking his arm and forcing him towards the dumpster, he reluctantly looked inside and balked in surprise.

Sitting atop what was probably half a ton of loose garbage was a very dirty, spattered book the size of a double-desk. Despite the garbage, it was clearly very ornate: its leather-bound cover was adorned with jewels and symbols that seemed to change color depending on the light. The book was held shut by a binding made for a lock, but the lock itself was clearly absent.

“Another gift from your friends?” Marco asked, and Janna shook her head, still grinning wildly.

“No! Well, at least, I don’t think so. This thing _fell from the sky,_ Marco! Right in front of me!”

Marco looked at her in disbelief. “Uh huh. You didn’t hit your head on the dumpster, right?”

Janna looked at him like he was an idiot. “No, safe kid. How else would it have even gotten in there? The stupid thing weighs like 200 pounds.”

Marco let the insult slide, and gave another look at the book. “Well, that’s interesting but not why I’m here. Back to class Janna, let’s go.”

He made to take her arm, but she wouldn’t budge. He also found that the sleeve he’d chosen to grab was soaked in… something… and he let go as soon as he could.

“Seriously? Marco, my entire life has been building up to this moment. Help me get it out.” Janna asked, then added, “please?”

Marco frowned at her. “Class.”

Then from a pocket, Janna withdrew an IOU, along with something that had fallen in with it while she’d been digging up the book. Marco took it by a corner, reluctantly, and sighed before throwing it into the dumpster. “Fine. But I’m not getting in there!”

Without another word, Janna jumped up into the dumpster and began to heave. Marco helped as best he could from the sidelines, and together, they had it up on its side a moment later. With another heave they leveraged it up onto the edge of the dumpster. Janna crouched down into the trash and put a shoulder beneath the opposite end, bringing it up until the cover was balanced on the rim.

“Ready?” She asked, and Marco took his side by its corners. The weight was on Janna and the dumpster itself - he had no idea just how heavy the thing might’ve actually been.

“Ready!” He called back anyway. Somehow, he suspected that her 200-pound figure might’ve been _too_ accurate.

With a final shove, Janna tilted the book up and into Marco’s arms, causing him to stagger back under the ridiculously lopsided weight. Thanks to his karate workouts, Marco wasn’t exactly out of shape - but he definitely _wasn’t_ trained for this weight class. He was only able to hold it for a moment, arms shaking, before he tilted it back towards the dumpster.

It fell forward with a crash, earning a shout of surprise from Janna as she attempted to climb out at the same time and instead toppled over.

She stood up and dusted herself off, a futile effort considering the critical levels of garbage-saturation that her clothing had reached. “Great!” She said. “Now help me move it someplace where we can look at it.”

“What’s wrong with here?” Marco asked, and Janna glared at him.

“Just because I got the book out of it doesn’t mean I like the smell of this dumpster, _Diaz._” She said icily. “Just help me move it.”

Marco rolled his eyes but took up his end of the book regardless, and together, they began to heave it into the school.

“Where’s someplace - ugh - that we can put this - urg - where it won’t get found for the rest of the day?” Janna grunted from her end. Suspended between them, the book was easily over 4 feet square, if not longer.

“Probably the library,” Marco forced out. “It’s still closed from - oof - last week.”

Hoisting it between them, they slowly made their way to the room in question. Marco forced the door open and together, they deposited it on the mostly-cleared floor and caught their breath. The bell rang above them, marking a break before the next class. Marco sighed and shut the door. Hopefully, Skullnick didn’t care enough to note that he, too, had gone missing for the rest of the period. Considering her attitude that day, he wasn’t holding his breath.

“So,” he finally said. “What is it? And are we allowed to go back to class now?”

Janna was hovering over the book, a gleam in her eyes. “I think it’s magic.”

Marco eyed it warily. “Like the necklace?”

Janna shot him a look. “Oh, so _now_ the necklace is magic.” She said venomously.

Marco looked at her warily. “Maybe,” he finally conceded.

Janna grunted and shook her head, dismissing the thought and instead, heaving the book open. “Woah,” she said.

Marco walked over immediately, staring down and seeing a mess of nonsense. “Uhhh….”

Janna’s eyes scanned the pages quickly, flipping through them and drinking in the… nothing. As far as Marco could tell, the pages were a cluster of junk - random scribbles, drawings, and other nonsense like he expected he’d find in one of Janna’s notebooks.

“Sorry, Janna,” he said. Nothing was further from the truth - all he could do was keep the relief out of his voice.

“Sorry? For what?” Janna asked. “This is _amazing._ Look at it!”

Marco looked at it. “It doesn’t look like anything.”

“You mean you can’t read it?” Janna asked. “Look.” She placed her finger onto a particularly dense illustration of a ball of spaghetti, and began to read aloud. “To summon a knowledge entity, an appropriate sacrifice must be made. Most entities -”

Marco squinted at her finger, which was moving along an invisible line as if reading from a book. “I don’t see anything,” he interrupted. “Just a bunch of squiggles.”

Janna looked up at him and gaped. “You swear?” Marco nodded.

Her eyes got even wider. “Marco, you know what this _means?_ This is an _actual magic book!”_

Marco scratched his head. “So we should light it on fire?”

Janna flinched, “I want to test it,” she said decisively a moment later, and Marco backed up.

“Test it?” He asked. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”

Janna wasn’t listening, though. “Oh, this one looks good. ‘Marshall the dead beneath you and remake the world.’ Start with a bang, right?”

“You’re going to try and _raise the-_”

“Let’s see,” she wasn’t listening. “Looks like it’s an incantation, some hand symbols, ‘the pain of a mortal being…’” at this she glanced at Marco, who stepped back further, “and a catalyst. That could be anything though. Oh, the picture has a drawing of a rat. Hang on...”

She paused, standing up and retrieving a model stegosaurus from the librarian’s desk. It was green, plasticky, about the size of her palm and definitely _not_ a rat, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Marco decided that this was as good a time as any to put his foot down. “Janna, I’m not letting you do this. It could be dangerous! What if you _actually_ raise the dead?”

“Then it’d be really cool?” Janna asked and stood up. “Sorry, by the way.”

“Sorry? For what?”

Quick as a flash, Janna turned and grabbed a textbook off a shelf, hurling it Marco’s shin. The blow connected before he could react, and he shouted in pain and staggered forward.

_Now or never!_

She cycled through the gestures as quickly as she could and then held up the dinosaur in her palm. Finally the incantation: _“Corpus Levitas, Diablo Dominum, Mondo Visium!”_

The dinosaur suddenly trembled, then began to steam. She dropped it, wincing, and her ears started to buzz.

A moment later she staggered and clutched her head, Marco just close enough to catch her as she fell to the side. Her lips moved like she was trying to form a sentence, but before she could, she looked up at him and her eyes rolled up.

Then she went limp, and was out cold.


End file.
